jg27
2022
It's always been a game of contradictions. A game with a light, inviting atmosphere, playful abilities that are designed to be "just fun to press" in the developer's own words and wide, forgiving hitboxes for those abilities that ensures even the bottom fragger on your squad can participate, making it the perfect squad game on paper. The heroes are lovingly crafted homages to 'superhero' culture around the world, coming with their own powerful and unique skills that'll make up for any deficet in your FPS fundamentals. It's a garuntee everyone will have a favorite.
but that quickly crystalizes into a hardcore competitive FPS any time you're in a state of actual play. Everyone swoops on the low performers like vultures and it's not hard to see why. If you're performing even slightly suboptimially, your team gets ran over instantly and you're unable to even press any of those fun buttons we've just talked about! None of the downtime of a game like Fortnite that allows for whole conversations with friends to take place as you explore and scrape together supplies means that you're always expected to be "on" and in the thick of it in Overwatch. One whiffed ability or lazy play could mean your entire team gets snowballed. Those strong individualized roles for heroes quickly backfire as you realize that counterpicking is key, meaning that you'll usually be swapping off the hero you want to spend time with in favor of what hero you need, or worse, be pressured off into what your team thinks they need. That character select screen goes from a well of infinite possibilities into a spreadsheet with optimal picks and no-hopers very quickly.
It's a hardcore team-based FPS, and yet it's competitive mode is dysfunctional. Strict restrictions on who can play with who means that you can't actually play with whatever team you've cultivated and usually have to settle for scraping together some kind of rapport with randoms. Que the insane amount of bitching I talked about earlier being tripled. You simply can't play this team based game with anyone you might have actually been practicing the game with at a high level.
The final nail in the coffin for competitive Overwatch is, ironically, the heroes themselves. The game had a good sense for risk vs reward when it started, but a series of overwhelming additions seemingly added out of obligation have broken this idea over it's knee. A new overwatch hero has to turn heads in a game that's already filled with broken abilities, so it seems like with each subsequent released boundaries get pushed and rules get broken. That might be part of the fun in a casual game, but in a competitive one it makes for a nightmarish hellscape where a bad decision by the hero designer can turn the game into a boring slog where you fight the same comps using the same strategies for months on end. If you think Kiriko's easy to use, Ultimate ability denying cleanse or illari's autohealing turret are a little frustrating to deal with in quick play imagine dealing with it in every game.
No hero bans in sight give you no control over your experience either, so the community can't even pick out problem heroes until the developers fix them like they can in games like Rainbow Six Siege. Blizzard has remained adamant that players should always have access to the full roster to pick from..or at least they did, until they started locking new heroes behind predatory battle passes. It's fine if it lines their pockets, essentially.
All of these had knock on effects on the game's ambitions as a pro esport. There was no variance in team comps and the few characters with skill expression were outgunned by boring, fire and forget cooldown rotation. It was sluggish from the word go, but it limped along through sheer force by activision until sponsorships dried up in the wake of Blizzard's notorious sexual harassment scandal and viewership hit all time lows.
So the competitive scene is in shambles and the game is a joke at high level play, which funnels sweats back into quick play and ironically makes the experience woeful for the casual player. There has to be some kind of third option to just relieve some stress and fuck around. And there is...if you don't mind playing the same shallow, reheated arcade modes that have been in rotation since 2016. Modes like low gravity and Mei's Snowball fight didn't hold anyone's attention back then and they barely do now. The odd inspired mode like limited duel can be fun for a lot longer, but the rotation means you'll have to wait until the day it's available. Even the casual modes are uneven and designed to exploit fomo.
The obvious third pillar Overwatch has been missing was planned to be an extensive single player mode built in with replayability and RPG progression, with the team able to lean into making abilities more overpowered and fun without any of that pesky obligation to balance. Not only would spending time with your favorite heroes be allowed, it'd be encouraged as you'd unlock new abilities for the time spent. Alas, after a quiet, protracted development cycle it fell through and left the lopsided experience we're left with today.
What little progression there was in Overwatch 1 was gutted out. It used to be possible to earn special skins in event challenges or by just completing enough games. You could probably make a great point about how such extrinsic motivators can directly contribute to low match quality by having people force themselves to play beyond what's satisfying to earn virtual goodies, and I'd probably agree, but the current system is far worse. A lot of the same trappings still exist, just rearranged and forcing you to drop real money on overpriced currency to participate. That cool Tracer skin is still locked behind a grind, but now the GRIND is locked behind a 10$ buy in. It cuts into the fun for the crowd who doesn't want to spend money and exploits those who can't help themselves. it's a lose, lose unless your name is Activision-Blizzard.
In 2024, after almost 8 years, it feels like Overwatch is buckling under it's own weight. I've been playing since 2016, and while I can say for a fact that parts of the game are still good, they're mostly things that came out that year. Making risky plays with Tracer's extensive movement, landing a critical dive with Winston or saving a friend at the last moment as Mercy still feel good, and syncing those risky plays up as a team to cover each other still feels like nothing else in the genre.
The problem is they're experiences that become increasingly rare, suffocating under poorly considered addition after poorly considered addition. Your old favorites feel obsolete in the face of new characters that can do their jobs in less interesting ways or deny their impact entirely with no skill required. Good times with your friends feel fleeting as the game quickly turns into a sweatfest with half the modes bent on breaking up the squad anyway. Any cool addition is underlined with increasingly growing price tags.
It seems like it wont be much longer before the dam busts. A pivotal leadership change from microsoft could stem some of the damage, but from where I'm standing it feels like too little, too late. I loved you, Overwatch, but I can't stand by what you've become. Blizzard needs to stop and decide once and for all what they really want from this thing. Until it does, I'm taking an extended sabbatical.
but that quickly crystalizes into a hardcore competitive FPS any time you're in a state of actual play. Everyone swoops on the low performers like vultures and it's not hard to see why. If you're performing even slightly suboptimially, your team gets ran over instantly and you're unable to even press any of those fun buttons we've just talked about! None of the downtime of a game like Fortnite that allows for whole conversations with friends to take place as you explore and scrape together supplies means that you're always expected to be "on" and in the thick of it in Overwatch. One whiffed ability or lazy play could mean your entire team gets snowballed. Those strong individualized roles for heroes quickly backfire as you realize that counterpicking is key, meaning that you'll usually be swapping off the hero you want to spend time with in favor of what hero you need, or worse, be pressured off into what your team thinks they need. That character select screen goes from a well of infinite possibilities into a spreadsheet with optimal picks and no-hopers very quickly.
It's a hardcore team-based FPS, and yet it's competitive mode is dysfunctional. Strict restrictions on who can play with who means that you can't actually play with whatever team you've cultivated and usually have to settle for scraping together some kind of rapport with randoms. Que the insane amount of bitching I talked about earlier being tripled. You simply can't play this team based game with anyone you might have actually been practicing the game with at a high level.
The final nail in the coffin for competitive Overwatch is, ironically, the heroes themselves. The game had a good sense for risk vs reward when it started, but a series of overwhelming additions seemingly added out of obligation have broken this idea over it's knee. A new overwatch hero has to turn heads in a game that's already filled with broken abilities, so it seems like with each subsequent released boundaries get pushed and rules get broken. That might be part of the fun in a casual game, but in a competitive one it makes for a nightmarish hellscape where a bad decision by the hero designer can turn the game into a boring slog where you fight the same comps using the same strategies for months on end. If you think Kiriko's easy to use, Ultimate ability denying cleanse or illari's autohealing turret are a little frustrating to deal with in quick play imagine dealing with it in every game.
No hero bans in sight give you no control over your experience either, so the community can't even pick out problem heroes until the developers fix them like they can in games like Rainbow Six Siege. Blizzard has remained adamant that players should always have access to the full roster to pick from..or at least they did, until they started locking new heroes behind predatory battle passes. It's fine if it lines their pockets, essentially.
All of these had knock on effects on the game's ambitions as a pro esport. There was no variance in team comps and the few characters with skill expression were outgunned by boring, fire and forget cooldown rotation. It was sluggish from the word go, but it limped along through sheer force by activision until sponsorships dried up in the wake of Blizzard's notorious sexual harassment scandal and viewership hit all time lows.
So the competitive scene is in shambles and the game is a joke at high level play, which funnels sweats back into quick play and ironically makes the experience woeful for the casual player. There has to be some kind of third option to just relieve some stress and fuck around. And there is...if you don't mind playing the same shallow, reheated arcade modes that have been in rotation since 2016. Modes like low gravity and Mei's Snowball fight didn't hold anyone's attention back then and they barely do now. The odd inspired mode like limited duel can be fun for a lot longer, but the rotation means you'll have to wait until the day it's available. Even the casual modes are uneven and designed to exploit fomo.
The obvious third pillar Overwatch has been missing was planned to be an extensive single player mode built in with replayability and RPG progression, with the team able to lean into making abilities more overpowered and fun without any of that pesky obligation to balance. Not only would spending time with your favorite heroes be allowed, it'd be encouraged as you'd unlock new abilities for the time spent. Alas, after a quiet, protracted development cycle it fell through and left the lopsided experience we're left with today.
What little progression there was in Overwatch 1 was gutted out. It used to be possible to earn special skins in event challenges or by just completing enough games. You could probably make a great point about how such extrinsic motivators can directly contribute to low match quality by having people force themselves to play beyond what's satisfying to earn virtual goodies, and I'd probably agree, but the current system is far worse. A lot of the same trappings still exist, just rearranged and forcing you to drop real money on overpriced currency to participate. That cool Tracer skin is still locked behind a grind, but now the GRIND is locked behind a 10$ buy in. It cuts into the fun for the crowd who doesn't want to spend money and exploits those who can't help themselves. it's a lose, lose unless your name is Activision-Blizzard.
In 2024, after almost 8 years, it feels like Overwatch is buckling under it's own weight. I've been playing since 2016, and while I can say for a fact that parts of the game are still good, they're mostly things that came out that year. Making risky plays with Tracer's extensive movement, landing a critical dive with Winston or saving a friend at the last moment as Mercy still feel good, and syncing those risky plays up as a team to cover each other still feels like nothing else in the genre.
The problem is they're experiences that become increasingly rare, suffocating under poorly considered addition after poorly considered addition. Your old favorites feel obsolete in the face of new characters that can do their jobs in less interesting ways or deny their impact entirely with no skill required. Good times with your friends feel fleeting as the game quickly turns into a sweatfest with half the modes bent on breaking up the squad anyway. Any cool addition is underlined with increasingly growing price tags.
It seems like it wont be much longer before the dam busts. A pivotal leadership change from microsoft could stem some of the damage, but from where I'm standing it feels like too little, too late. I loved you, Overwatch, but I can't stand by what you've become. Blizzard needs to stop and decide once and for all what they really want from this thing. Until it does, I'm taking an extended sabbatical.
2002
The pitch here only gets more novel in the era of damage spongey bosses and slow, meticulous movement: Kill every enemy as fast as possible, with the quirk that every defeat in an encounter powers up your sword. Use your extreme mobility to dart around the battlefield, killing smaller enemies so you can fell the larger ones in a single strike. Bosses that would take 15 minutes in this game's peers have the potential to take 15 seconds here with the right approach. It's a uniquely sega approach to 3D action games and while it's not a perfect translation of the Ninja-flavored 2D shoot-em-up the OGs were, it's repsectable in it's own right and that's more important. The demon sword feasting on the blood of enemies and eating away at the player's own health if they're too passive is both the perfect modernization and contextualization of a classic arcade timer, incentivizing active play in all the same ways with a sinister edge that fits the new tone like a glove.
The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.
The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.
Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.
Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.
Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.
Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.
The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.
The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.
Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.
Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.
Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.
Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.
2005
It's neat but it's still got that classic star fox game problem of not really being a star fox game
2003
What the fuck?
It understands the combination of rigid rules and creative, rapid fire additions to those rules that make Mario great, but it doesn't understand the other critical ingrediant in that pie: pacing. There's just one too many junk levels, boring cutscenes, and one-and-done gimmicks for this game to be worth replaying the same the classic Mario games are. Their heart is in the right place here, and the overhauled aesthetic shines a light on how many basic rules of animation NSMB got wrong, but it needed a more aggressive editor to stand with the greats.
It's hard to be too mad at it though. Mario's back, and as games become more and more concerned with chasing cinema this serves as a nice oasis.
It's hard to be too mad at it though. Mario's back, and as games become more and more concerned with chasing cinema this serves as a nice oasis.
2023
The new drive mechanic puts all of your character's most powerful tools front and center while still discouraging spam and keeping the careful balance created by the EX system intact. Slower frame data encourages more of a back and forth between opponents, bringing whiff punishing and smart button usage back into focus over SFV's longer blockstrings. Multiple supers are back again with key restrictions from the old games removed: You no longer have to pick a super at the expense of others, and it's tied to a separate resource to EX moves. All of your meaningful decisions are now made in the moment. Will you take advantage of the defensive power of a level 1 super to get out of a jam, or save your cash for that risky combo into level 3 super that you've been practicing? Maybe you'll drop the combo and blow all your resources whiffing at air, having to claw your way back to victory in burnout.
The drive system doesn't end at just modifying existing systems though. Drive rush, drive impact and drive parry also exists as universal options that facilitate certain styles of play. Even the stiffest of characters gain some offensive mobility from drive rush. Drive impact both has the defensive capability to shrug off mindless offense and can combine with your character's other tools to create devastating 'checkmate' scenarios on offense. This leaves Drive parry feeling like the weak link. It's a powerful defensive tool with barely any risk involved, making it a little easy to shrug off some well executed mixups. Still, it's hard to deny the rush one gets from a well timed perfect parry into a punish.
Every returning character's kit has been retooled to combine the best from previous entries with new moves that thread the needle. This pairs with the new freeform to make your characters truly feel like swiss army knives again with a dozen ways to play neutrals, go on the offense, or respond to danger. Multiple supers lets the designers have their cake and eat it too, with flashy cinematic supers getting to share space with the more nuanced utility supers, giving each character a strong sense of style and substance.
These all facilitate a learning curve that makes learning characters truly rewarding in a way that feels missing from some other modern FGs. I latched onto Kimberly early on and while there's definetly a lot of habits in common for the best players, it feels like most other Kimberlys I come across get hyperfocused on specific parts of her kit. Every one I fight has just a little bit of room to express themselves, which is an important part of making repeated matches interesting.
Speaking of repeated matches, props to capcom for being the only developer to understand the menus are a means to an end and not something we want to spend an extended period of time looking at. The UI seems pretty bloated at first, but matching and instantly rematching through fighting ground quickly proves painless in the exact way I was hoping for. Combine that with the mostly-fixed netcode and you have a perfect system for hours and hours of play.
All those presentation bells and whistles are still there, don't get me wrong. The decision to move away from SFV's cold, function over form presentation was a smart one. The menus are coated with full splash screens of the characters fighting, the CSS gives every character space to show off their personality during the fight, even the loading screen gives you space to jeer at your opponent while the fight queues up. It's a rare combination of function and form that gives these legendary personalities a lot of room to show themselves off.
And if you're one of those people that enjoys the recent trend of lobbies with social features, this game has that too, and it's much less buggy and more functional than most attempts at it! If you're burned out at more targeted matchmaking then you can literally just drop into a random lobby with fandom folks and shoot the shit while you fight. Capcom directly identified that traditional matchmaking and arcsys style lobbies are two different experiences and cleanly separated them. It made me realize I enjoy the latter as a sometimes food.
As far as systems go, this is a dream sequel. Every major issue was fixed and even more new ideas were added on top of that. There's a host of content to play with on launch with regular drops already being established for new stuff.
The game only starts to leave something to be desired on the fringes. I'm all for the graffiti/hip hop influence, but I'm not sure it meshes well with the otherwise realistic rendering for the characters. There's a lot of stylistic quirks here that make it so SF doesn't feel like it's completely lost it's anime influenced edge, but on the whole I think leaning into something more stylish would have been better.
This isn't meant to disrespect capcom's effort here. Despite the impression the box art might give, the overhaul to facial animations mostly works well. We've come leaps and bounds from SFV Ken. Some uncanny valley just slips through on occasion in a way that makes you wonder if a more stylistic approach could have achieved more with less.
As much as the game pushes the hip hop angle, it's baffling for them to ship by far the worst soundtrack in the series to go with that. Boring, walgreens tier pop beats are assigned to every character without any consideration for their legendary themes from previous titles. Everything feels maybe a notch above Juri's infamous SFV theme. Forgettable at best, sometimes outright amateurish at worst. A damn shame after V's music only got better with each update.
Now, this last complaint is a little bit more subjective, but I definitely didn't care for world tour mode. I think it was a good inclusion for casual players to give them a safe space to learn the game and make them feel like they got their money's worth, but for me it felt like a boring slog where I had to slowly unlock moves I had instant access to 2 doors down. I'm choosing not to hold it against the game too much because it's clearly not meant for me. Hell, it even seems to have ripple effects on my experience considering how crowded the servers are every night. Still I wish most of the fun narrative content with these characters I've come to love wasn't locked behind a mode that isn't really for me otherwise.
There's a lot to nitpick, but in the 10 years I've been playing fighting games I haven't played this one that started off this strong...ever? It correctly identifies some weak points not only with it's own series, but the entire genre that needs addressing. Even more important than all of that it's just so much goddamned fun. It makes me look forward to what future fighting games influenced by this will do instead of being wary of the future like I was post-ST
It's the most fun I've had with a game since I first got into Skullgirls all those years ago and it's only going to get better. A culmination of a legendary hot streak from Capcom. Street Fighter is great again with no 'buts' attached.
The drive system doesn't end at just modifying existing systems though. Drive rush, drive impact and drive parry also exists as universal options that facilitate certain styles of play. Even the stiffest of characters gain some offensive mobility from drive rush. Drive impact both has the defensive capability to shrug off mindless offense and can combine with your character's other tools to create devastating 'checkmate' scenarios on offense. This leaves Drive parry feeling like the weak link. It's a powerful defensive tool with barely any risk involved, making it a little easy to shrug off some well executed mixups. Still, it's hard to deny the rush one gets from a well timed perfect parry into a punish.
Every returning character's kit has been retooled to combine the best from previous entries with new moves that thread the needle. This pairs with the new freeform to make your characters truly feel like swiss army knives again with a dozen ways to play neutrals, go on the offense, or respond to danger. Multiple supers lets the designers have their cake and eat it too, with flashy cinematic supers getting to share space with the more nuanced utility supers, giving each character a strong sense of style and substance.
These all facilitate a learning curve that makes learning characters truly rewarding in a way that feels missing from some other modern FGs. I latched onto Kimberly early on and while there's definetly a lot of habits in common for the best players, it feels like most other Kimberlys I come across get hyperfocused on specific parts of her kit. Every one I fight has just a little bit of room to express themselves, which is an important part of making repeated matches interesting.
Speaking of repeated matches, props to capcom for being the only developer to understand the menus are a means to an end and not something we want to spend an extended period of time looking at. The UI seems pretty bloated at first, but matching and instantly rematching through fighting ground quickly proves painless in the exact way I was hoping for. Combine that with the mostly-fixed netcode and you have a perfect system for hours and hours of play.
All those presentation bells and whistles are still there, don't get me wrong. The decision to move away from SFV's cold, function over form presentation was a smart one. The menus are coated with full splash screens of the characters fighting, the CSS gives every character space to show off their personality during the fight, even the loading screen gives you space to jeer at your opponent while the fight queues up. It's a rare combination of function and form that gives these legendary personalities a lot of room to show themselves off.
And if you're one of those people that enjoys the recent trend of lobbies with social features, this game has that too, and it's much less buggy and more functional than most attempts at it! If you're burned out at more targeted matchmaking then you can literally just drop into a random lobby with fandom folks and shoot the shit while you fight. Capcom directly identified that traditional matchmaking and arcsys style lobbies are two different experiences and cleanly separated them. It made me realize I enjoy the latter as a sometimes food.
As far as systems go, this is a dream sequel. Every major issue was fixed and even more new ideas were added on top of that. There's a host of content to play with on launch with regular drops already being established for new stuff.
The game only starts to leave something to be desired on the fringes. I'm all for the graffiti/hip hop influence, but I'm not sure it meshes well with the otherwise realistic rendering for the characters. There's a lot of stylistic quirks here that make it so SF doesn't feel like it's completely lost it's anime influenced edge, but on the whole I think leaning into something more stylish would have been better.
This isn't meant to disrespect capcom's effort here. Despite the impression the box art might give, the overhaul to facial animations mostly works well. We've come leaps and bounds from SFV Ken. Some uncanny valley just slips through on occasion in a way that makes you wonder if a more stylistic approach could have achieved more with less.
As much as the game pushes the hip hop angle, it's baffling for them to ship by far the worst soundtrack in the series to go with that. Boring, walgreens tier pop beats are assigned to every character without any consideration for their legendary themes from previous titles. Everything feels maybe a notch above Juri's infamous SFV theme. Forgettable at best, sometimes outright amateurish at worst. A damn shame after V's music only got better with each update.
Now, this last complaint is a little bit more subjective, but I definitely didn't care for world tour mode. I think it was a good inclusion for casual players to give them a safe space to learn the game and make them feel like they got their money's worth, but for me it felt like a boring slog where I had to slowly unlock moves I had instant access to 2 doors down. I'm choosing not to hold it against the game too much because it's clearly not meant for me. Hell, it even seems to have ripple effects on my experience considering how crowded the servers are every night. Still I wish most of the fun narrative content with these characters I've come to love wasn't locked behind a mode that isn't really for me otherwise.
There's a lot to nitpick, but in the 10 years I've been playing fighting games I haven't played this one that started off this strong...ever? It correctly identifies some weak points not only with it's own series, but the entire genre that needs addressing. Even more important than all of that it's just so much goddamned fun. It makes me look forward to what future fighting games influenced by this will do instead of being wary of the future like I was post-ST
It's the most fun I've had with a game since I first got into Skullgirls all those years ago and it's only going to get better. A culmination of a legendary hot streak from Capcom. Street Fighter is great again with no 'buts' attached.
The first half is more in line with the original separate ways in that it's a lot of repeated content. Even with some fun remixed areas and enemy arrangements its hard not to feel sort of like it's a little 'been there, done that' especially since the campaign is already replayable. Ada's new grappling hook melee attack is fun to mess around with but it mostly just makes the game easier in practice.
But the last half really pulled out some great sequences, from the retooled laboratory, to the new boss battles and the final setpiece which managed to match the tension of the actual final boss fight without just being a repeat. They even managed to cram the skylift in here!
The original separate ways wasn't anything to write home about but this introduces just enough new stuff to be worth checking out if you're a fan. If the idea of paying $10 for setpieces that should have been in the base game puts you off, I'd wait on it. It wont be long until there's a sale or a cheap bundle to grab. Until then, the mercenary updates are free, so you can try out Ada's new combat quirks and Wesker's OP new gimmick with no strings attached. A fun update to one of this year's highlights.
But the last half really pulled out some great sequences, from the retooled laboratory, to the new boss battles and the final setpiece which managed to match the tension of the actual final boss fight without just being a repeat. They even managed to cram the skylift in here!
The original separate ways wasn't anything to write home about but this introduces just enough new stuff to be worth checking out if you're a fan. If the idea of paying $10 for setpieces that should have been in the base game puts you off, I'd wait on it. It wont be long until there's a sale or a cheap bundle to grab. Until then, the mercenary updates are free, so you can try out Ada's new combat quirks and Wesker's OP new gimmick with no strings attached. A fun update to one of this year's highlights.
This update is interesting to me because it mostly just highlights the things about the game that don't work. People were willing to ignore shi because the main game trended easy, something not working right rarely stopped your progress and you could mostly mash through and enjoy the (bad) story.
Now? The goal of the DLC seems to try and milk the mechanics for all their worth, but Sonic Team didn't realize the proverbial cow was more like a donkey, so we come out a little underserved, to put it lightly. I've seen more people pointing out problems I noticed on release, so I guess it's a good thing overall? Maybe now some of these flaws will be on the table for being tackled next game.
The new enemy types just speeding up attack animations and health pools to comical degrees is amateur hour shit, like they just saw that platinum games do that on higher difficulties but didn't get why or what other changes they made, so you just get a mess of unreactable animations and waves of hitboxes. Easy enough to deal with when you remember hold parry and Sonic's invincible cinematic counters exist but even when you know the "strats" these new combat challenges aren't very fun or promote much mastery. Just cheese and spam. The closest I got to a dopamine rush was remembering that you can "parry" those disc attacks away while you're comboing an enemy and wrap things up pretty quickly.
Sonic Team in their childlike approach to feedback heard you guys making fun of them for the parry mechanic but didn't go back and fix any of the bad tells and animations on the boss fights, so you're sometimes challenged to land a fame perfect parry on a boss who's body you clipped through and thus the animation you can't actually see. I've always thought these fights looked like shit to the point where it affected how fun they actually are and the strictness of the challenge just amplifies that. The first rule of a good action game is clarity, and good tells combine with a good camera to facilitate that. Sonic Frontiers has never had either of these things in the best of times.
Which leads me to my polite suggestion for the next game. I get it, Frontiers is peak, it's an excellent foundation for the next game yadda yadda I lost that fight, whatever. But if you aren't going to hire a combat designer, just chop this shit out. I don't think anyone wants to go through another six games of you guys "finding yourselves" by slowly adding features action games figured out on the PS2. Double down on the cyloop but otherwise the rest of this shit is just unnecessary. Add some flashy finishing QTEs to regular Sonic boss fights and it'll go over just as well, I promise you.
As for the positives, how about I hit you with a genuinely unpopular opinion. I kind of like the tower climbs. I like that a Sonic game was willing to push it's movement mechanics this far again. This is the most satisfied I've felt after a boost section since Unleashed. Something like this would have never been good with the still-shittastic Cyberspace controls but the main game offers just enough precision to get away with a lot of this shit. Not all of it. The homing attack will still fail at critical moments and set you back entire minutes of progress, the physics are still unreliable to the point where setpieces will straight up fail sometimes, but as far as the inflated difficulty in this DLC goes this is it at it's most successful to me. It made me wish climbing tall structures was more central to the game's identity instead of bad combat and puzzles. These would be a lot better if the base controls weren't so flimsy, but I can at least say they have the right idea here.
In general, there are pockets of good level design here that makes me think the next game might be alright if they prioritize the right things. Like, Sonic Colors levels, which would be better than where we've landed here.
This heat doesn't transfer to the other characters though. Their sections are surprisingly short, most of them control like shit because of the bugged acceleration and even leveled up their kits aren't actually finished. They don't have the tools to hang with the suped up guardians so you end up having to avoid most enemies in a bit that I wouldn't call an intentional immersive choice. Again like with Sonic there are pockets of clever movement challenges here, but the movement is a lot worse than what Sonic has to work with so it comes across as frustrating sometimes. Thankfully despite how bad Tails and Knuckles's flight/glide feel their cheese potential is as good as ever so you don't have to engage with some of this stuff.
...Still, I'll admit that my grinch heart grew a few sizes when i fired up the DLC and was walking around as Amy Rose again for the first time in almost 20 years. It shrunk again when i realized I had to grind for any hammer moves at all, but it grew again like an hour later when I got the cyclone and realize it came with free flight. Little pockets of fanservice like that make me think this will be a bigger hit with Adventure fans than it was with me.
So how about that new ending?
Hide contents
Well, of all the years I've spent reading and generally enjoying Ian Flynn's books I can count the times he stuck the landing on one hand, so coming out with an uneven mess twice in a row was a possibility that shouldn't have escaped me, and yet I'm shocked. The new ending is worse than the one they had in a lot of ways. The most I can give it is that they tied it back into the Super Sonic mechanics and the spectacle is slightly better.
Super Sonic but angrier was the one pitfall Sonic Team was smart to avoid over the years, so to see the acclaimed Ian Flynn walk them right into it over the base game's smart choice to give Sage the floor is disappointing even for them. Flashy action is cool, but the writing has to support it as a foundation. Sage helping deal the final blow to The End underlined her choice to fight for what she cares about despite the odds, a change Sonic helped facilitate, hence her assisting her with the final battle.
In contrast, what exactly has changed about Sonic over the course of this journey to to justify a new form? I don't care for this game's writing on the whole but at least Tails, Knuckles and Amy had to do some soul searching. Even Eggman had to admit he cared about some shit. Sonic? Nothing. not even this DLC that's ostensibly about challenging him. The ancients give him a little grief for breaking their shit but he manages to charm them like always.
And that's the ending's biggest sin: They snub the game's most interesting character and rob her of her moment to give the least interesting ones a victory lap. They don't even let her keep the sacrifice at the end which I don't really get. We knew she was fine. It was just a way for her to show the extent of her devotion to Eggman. Now that's gone, and this is better because Hype? I don't buy it. If Sonic wants to be Demon Slayer he needs to go back and study that shit. Explosive action is cool but without character writing underpinning it it can turn into noise very quickly unless it's executed well.
Maybe I could take all this on the chin if the spectacle was worth it but the cutscene direction is still pretty lackluster. I know nobody waited all this time just to fight a suped up version of Supreme in the exact same area. The cannon setpiece was cool but I was hoping that The End would actually get like, a design?
Even the voice direction took a hit from the main game. Everyone sounds like they're literally just 40somethings talking into a mic which doesn't fit the youthful energy these characters are supposed to give off at all. I don't even get what they were going for with Amy's delivery most of the time. It's like there's ZERO direction on some of her lines. Mike Pollock continues to phone it in on Eggman's big game as well, failing to sell an important character turn for him.
All in all, I've felt that this game's tone is playing against the franchise for a while now and this update does nothing to shake that feeling off. The subdued performances this story demands doesn't play to the strengh of the characters or the actors involved, making it awkward at the best of times.
In conclusion there are some bright spots but yeah this was a dull, bloated waste of time when smaller update might have been able to cut to the heart of things better. Maybe one new character instead of three, chop out the obligation for it to be three or four hours long and thus a lot of the filler, and take a scalpel to the ending instead of a chainsaw.
As usual with these types of Sonic games the bright spots are being drowned by feature creep, making something that's a lot more fun to think about than it is to play. What if they had nailed all this shit? That would have been cool, right? It's a nice thought, but charging 60 dollars for a thought exercise stopped being cool 17 years ago. A massive update to one of these games is a chance to deliver on that promise some, but them over-committing and under-designing the damn update the same way they do the games just proves to me they don't have it in them no matter how many chances you give them.
Now? The goal of the DLC seems to try and milk the mechanics for all their worth, but Sonic Team didn't realize the proverbial cow was more like a donkey, so we come out a little underserved, to put it lightly. I've seen more people pointing out problems I noticed on release, so I guess it's a good thing overall? Maybe now some of these flaws will be on the table for being tackled next game.
The new enemy types just speeding up attack animations and health pools to comical degrees is amateur hour shit, like they just saw that platinum games do that on higher difficulties but didn't get why or what other changes they made, so you just get a mess of unreactable animations and waves of hitboxes. Easy enough to deal with when you remember hold parry and Sonic's invincible cinematic counters exist but even when you know the "strats" these new combat challenges aren't very fun or promote much mastery. Just cheese and spam. The closest I got to a dopamine rush was remembering that you can "parry" those disc attacks away while you're comboing an enemy and wrap things up pretty quickly.
Sonic Team in their childlike approach to feedback heard you guys making fun of them for the parry mechanic but didn't go back and fix any of the bad tells and animations on the boss fights, so you're sometimes challenged to land a fame perfect parry on a boss who's body you clipped through and thus the animation you can't actually see. I've always thought these fights looked like shit to the point where it affected how fun they actually are and the strictness of the challenge just amplifies that. The first rule of a good action game is clarity, and good tells combine with a good camera to facilitate that. Sonic Frontiers has never had either of these things in the best of times.
Which leads me to my polite suggestion for the next game. I get it, Frontiers is peak, it's an excellent foundation for the next game yadda yadda I lost that fight, whatever. But if you aren't going to hire a combat designer, just chop this shit out. I don't think anyone wants to go through another six games of you guys "finding yourselves" by slowly adding features action games figured out on the PS2. Double down on the cyloop but otherwise the rest of this shit is just unnecessary. Add some flashy finishing QTEs to regular Sonic boss fights and it'll go over just as well, I promise you.
As for the positives, how about I hit you with a genuinely unpopular opinion. I kind of like the tower climbs. I like that a Sonic game was willing to push it's movement mechanics this far again. This is the most satisfied I've felt after a boost section since Unleashed. Something like this would have never been good with the still-shittastic Cyberspace controls but the main game offers just enough precision to get away with a lot of this shit. Not all of it. The homing attack will still fail at critical moments and set you back entire minutes of progress, the physics are still unreliable to the point where setpieces will straight up fail sometimes, but as far as the inflated difficulty in this DLC goes this is it at it's most successful to me. It made me wish climbing tall structures was more central to the game's identity instead of bad combat and puzzles. These would be a lot better if the base controls weren't so flimsy, but I can at least say they have the right idea here.
In general, there are pockets of good level design here that makes me think the next game might be alright if they prioritize the right things. Like, Sonic Colors levels, which would be better than where we've landed here.
This heat doesn't transfer to the other characters though. Their sections are surprisingly short, most of them control like shit because of the bugged acceleration and even leveled up their kits aren't actually finished. They don't have the tools to hang with the suped up guardians so you end up having to avoid most enemies in a bit that I wouldn't call an intentional immersive choice. Again like with Sonic there are pockets of clever movement challenges here, but the movement is a lot worse than what Sonic has to work with so it comes across as frustrating sometimes. Thankfully despite how bad Tails and Knuckles's flight/glide feel their cheese potential is as good as ever so you don't have to engage with some of this stuff.
...Still, I'll admit that my grinch heart grew a few sizes when i fired up the DLC and was walking around as Amy Rose again for the first time in almost 20 years. It shrunk again when i realized I had to grind for any hammer moves at all, but it grew again like an hour later when I got the cyclone and realize it came with free flight. Little pockets of fanservice like that make me think this will be a bigger hit with Adventure fans than it was with me.
So how about that new ending?
Hide contents
Well, of all the years I've spent reading and generally enjoying Ian Flynn's books I can count the times he stuck the landing on one hand, so coming out with an uneven mess twice in a row was a possibility that shouldn't have escaped me, and yet I'm shocked. The new ending is worse than the one they had in a lot of ways. The most I can give it is that they tied it back into the Super Sonic mechanics and the spectacle is slightly better.
Super Sonic but angrier was the one pitfall Sonic Team was smart to avoid over the years, so to see the acclaimed Ian Flynn walk them right into it over the base game's smart choice to give Sage the floor is disappointing even for them. Flashy action is cool, but the writing has to support it as a foundation. Sage helping deal the final blow to The End underlined her choice to fight for what she cares about despite the odds, a change Sonic helped facilitate, hence her assisting her with the final battle.
In contrast, what exactly has changed about Sonic over the course of this journey to to justify a new form? I don't care for this game's writing on the whole but at least Tails, Knuckles and Amy had to do some soul searching. Even Eggman had to admit he cared about some shit. Sonic? Nothing. not even this DLC that's ostensibly about challenging him. The ancients give him a little grief for breaking their shit but he manages to charm them like always.
And that's the ending's biggest sin: They snub the game's most interesting character and rob her of her moment to give the least interesting ones a victory lap. They don't even let her keep the sacrifice at the end which I don't really get. We knew she was fine. It was just a way for her to show the extent of her devotion to Eggman. Now that's gone, and this is better because Hype? I don't buy it. If Sonic wants to be Demon Slayer he needs to go back and study that shit. Explosive action is cool but without character writing underpinning it it can turn into noise very quickly unless it's executed well.
Maybe I could take all this on the chin if the spectacle was worth it but the cutscene direction is still pretty lackluster. I know nobody waited all this time just to fight a suped up version of Supreme in the exact same area. The cannon setpiece was cool but I was hoping that The End would actually get like, a design?
Even the voice direction took a hit from the main game. Everyone sounds like they're literally just 40somethings talking into a mic which doesn't fit the youthful energy these characters are supposed to give off at all. I don't even get what they were going for with Amy's delivery most of the time. It's like there's ZERO direction on some of her lines. Mike Pollock continues to phone it in on Eggman's big game as well, failing to sell an important character turn for him.
All in all, I've felt that this game's tone is playing against the franchise for a while now and this update does nothing to shake that feeling off. The subdued performances this story demands doesn't play to the strengh of the characters or the actors involved, making it awkward at the best of times.
In conclusion there are some bright spots but yeah this was a dull, bloated waste of time when smaller update might have been able to cut to the heart of things better. Maybe one new character instead of three, chop out the obligation for it to be three or four hours long and thus a lot of the filler, and take a scalpel to the ending instead of a chainsaw.
As usual with these types of Sonic games the bright spots are being drowned by feature creep, making something that's a lot more fun to think about than it is to play. What if they had nailed all this shit? That would have been cool, right? It's a nice thought, but charging 60 dollars for a thought exercise stopped being cool 17 years ago. A massive update to one of these games is a chance to deliver on that promise some, but them over-committing and under-designing the damn update the same way they do the games just proves to me they don't have it in them no matter how many chances you give them.
2023
The first impression this game leaves isn't great. The first thing it teaches you how to do is to ride the new gimmick around, and after that you're flooded with commentary from the pit crew about what you should be doing next. There's only a certain threshold of charming little space men you can have before the idea begins to wear out it's welcome and take focus away on what the actual experience is supposed to be. Pikmin 4 far exceeds it. So many cutscenes filled with the boring, forgettable crew having redundant conversations filled with bad jokes. None of these characters contribute anything to the gameplay loop either unlike the captains from previous games, so it's a lot of time devoted to characters you don't actually see putting any effort into solving the problems at hand. All that responsibility is replaced onto YOU, yes, YOU. The game opts to let the player create their own captain this time around and falls into every narrative pit that decision usually creates. Characters lavish you with praise at every opportunity for the most simple tasks, which is an about face from the cynicism that coated the writing of the first two games. Olimar was either completely on his own with no one to confide but himself, which added to the survivalist atmosphere, or saddled with the worst co-workers possible which was funny. This game is very straightlaced by comparison which is a step down from the unique tone the games had before.
This aggressive hand-holding permeates every aspect of this game. There are more PIkmin types present in the main campaign than ever, and progression is more open ended and nonlinear. You'd think this might open up a variety of different team compositions depending on the situation but the game only ever allows 3 types out at once and each area and cave has a recommended team. At that point, why break away from what the game has already set out from you?
Oachi starts the game as a good supplementary addition. He can jump and ferry the squad across water which opens up some traversal puzzles and decisions that just wouldn't have been possible in previous games. It also means there are less obvious roadblocks at the start, making each map feel more open ended and fun to traverse. Water was such a strong progress blocker in previous games that it dictated the order which you could do things pretty heavily, so removing that is a nice change of pace.
My suggestion to people who enjoyed the previous games is that you try to avoid upgrading him too much though. Beef up his defense for sure, but stacking on too many resistances and treasure-carrying abilities and he genuinely renders most of your Pikmin redundant. Technically something you'd have to opt into but it's an easy pitfall to miss.
One thing that also deserves praise is the cave system. Each one feels like it's more clearly centered around a unique challenge or gimmick this time around, so it's always something fresh. I was afraid the "dandori" challenges would feel like padding, and the battles against Olimar definitely do but the time trials are the opposite. They're carefully designed treasure hunting gauntlets where time limits are harsh and resources are limited. You'll have to form an excellent plan and execute it perfectly to get platinum medals on each one. They feel like the game at it's most Pikmin. They highlight the way these systems can shine under pressure in a way that doesn't reflect well on the rest of the game.
Outside of certain, clearly marked challenges though Pikmin 4 is so lax that it risks making a lot of series staples redundant. The day/night time limit still exists, but there's no hard limit on days and enemies never respawn so the only punishment for not completing a task in a timely matter is a quick trip back to camp. They might as well have let you explore for as long as you like. More gimmicks like Serene Shore's falling tides would have made timely execution of tasks more important without the punishing mechanics from 1 and 3, but for the most part they've removed those and replaced them with nothing which takes a little too much friction away from the experience.
The friction removal doesn't just end there. A generous 'time rewind feature' hovers over your head any time you make a mistake. Pikmin has been embracing save-scumming as a feature more and more over time, but having this prompt pop up the second you make a serious mistake feels like a step over the line. Save scumming was definetly possible in the first two games but easy enough to ignore and forget about. 3 signposted it as a feature and now 4 has prompts popping up everywhere, letting you rewind down to the second. If the game is going to assure me over and over again there's no real danger to losing resource..what's the point of the focus on resources?
The overt handholding focus leads us to our last error, probably the game's most damning. The controls. In contrast to the extreme amounts of control the pointer gave you in previous games, Pikmin 4 opts to automate as many functions as possible. Automatically aiming, automatically counting how many Pikmin you need before it cuts off your throw with no regard for how many Pikmin you might actually want on a task, and Pikmin trying to take more agency to automatically start tasks regardless of your input. These start as nuisances that don't hurt much when the game is more laid back, but as dandori challenges and late game bosses ramp things up they become a genuine pain point. I can't count how many times I've had Pikmin die because they latched onto the wrong object, or had my time for a challenge thrown off because the game decided the task had enough Pikmin on it.
All of this feels like Nintendo went a little too far trying to make Pikmin widely appealing. Iwata Asks interviews reveal the developers laid the lack of sales on the mechanics when to me there was a more obvious answer staring everyone in the face: The gamecube and the Wii U were both notorious flops. Pikmin was obviously going to do way better on a console that has an actual install base. Every Nintendo IP received an explosion of sales on Switch for a reason. Nintendo should have at least tried a more traditional title on the switch first before coming to this conclusion.
I liked Pikmin 4 overall, but only because of what it carried over from previous games, not because of anything it added. It has moments of very strong level design but it's held back too much with all the helicopter-parenting. At the very least, whenever Nintendo released a more handhold-y title in the past they worked their way back to something more challenging. My hope is that Pikmin 5 trusts the player more and opts to give them more agency in the game. Even if harsh time penalties never return, I hope they find different ways to put pressure on the player and put their resources to the test.
This aggressive hand-holding permeates every aspect of this game. There are more PIkmin types present in the main campaign than ever, and progression is more open ended and nonlinear. You'd think this might open up a variety of different team compositions depending on the situation but the game only ever allows 3 types out at once and each area and cave has a recommended team. At that point, why break away from what the game has already set out from you?
Oachi starts the game as a good supplementary addition. He can jump and ferry the squad across water which opens up some traversal puzzles and decisions that just wouldn't have been possible in previous games. It also means there are less obvious roadblocks at the start, making each map feel more open ended and fun to traverse. Water was such a strong progress blocker in previous games that it dictated the order which you could do things pretty heavily, so removing that is a nice change of pace.
My suggestion to people who enjoyed the previous games is that you try to avoid upgrading him too much though. Beef up his defense for sure, but stacking on too many resistances and treasure-carrying abilities and he genuinely renders most of your Pikmin redundant. Technically something you'd have to opt into but it's an easy pitfall to miss.
One thing that also deserves praise is the cave system. Each one feels like it's more clearly centered around a unique challenge or gimmick this time around, so it's always something fresh. I was afraid the "dandori" challenges would feel like padding, and the battles against Olimar definitely do but the time trials are the opposite. They're carefully designed treasure hunting gauntlets where time limits are harsh and resources are limited. You'll have to form an excellent plan and execute it perfectly to get platinum medals on each one. They feel like the game at it's most Pikmin. They highlight the way these systems can shine under pressure in a way that doesn't reflect well on the rest of the game.
Outside of certain, clearly marked challenges though Pikmin 4 is so lax that it risks making a lot of series staples redundant. The day/night time limit still exists, but there's no hard limit on days and enemies never respawn so the only punishment for not completing a task in a timely matter is a quick trip back to camp. They might as well have let you explore for as long as you like. More gimmicks like Serene Shore's falling tides would have made timely execution of tasks more important without the punishing mechanics from 1 and 3, but for the most part they've removed those and replaced them with nothing which takes a little too much friction away from the experience.
The friction removal doesn't just end there. A generous 'time rewind feature' hovers over your head any time you make a mistake. Pikmin has been embracing save-scumming as a feature more and more over time, but having this prompt pop up the second you make a serious mistake feels like a step over the line. Save scumming was definetly possible in the first two games but easy enough to ignore and forget about. 3 signposted it as a feature and now 4 has prompts popping up everywhere, letting you rewind down to the second. If the game is going to assure me over and over again there's no real danger to losing resource..what's the point of the focus on resources?
The overt handholding focus leads us to our last error, probably the game's most damning. The controls. In contrast to the extreme amounts of control the pointer gave you in previous games, Pikmin 4 opts to automate as many functions as possible. Automatically aiming, automatically counting how many Pikmin you need before it cuts off your throw with no regard for how many Pikmin you might actually want on a task, and Pikmin trying to take more agency to automatically start tasks regardless of your input. These start as nuisances that don't hurt much when the game is more laid back, but as dandori challenges and late game bosses ramp things up they become a genuine pain point. I can't count how many times I've had Pikmin die because they latched onto the wrong object, or had my time for a challenge thrown off because the game decided the task had enough Pikmin on it.
All of this feels like Nintendo went a little too far trying to make Pikmin widely appealing. Iwata Asks interviews reveal the developers laid the lack of sales on the mechanics when to me there was a more obvious answer staring everyone in the face: The gamecube and the Wii U were both notorious flops. Pikmin was obviously going to do way better on a console that has an actual install base. Every Nintendo IP received an explosion of sales on Switch for a reason. Nintendo should have at least tried a more traditional title on the switch first before coming to this conclusion.
I liked Pikmin 4 overall, but only because of what it carried over from previous games, not because of anything it added. It has moments of very strong level design but it's held back too much with all the helicopter-parenting. At the very least, whenever Nintendo released a more handhold-y title in the past they worked their way back to something more challenging. My hope is that Pikmin 5 trusts the player more and opts to give them more agency in the game. Even if harsh time penalties never return, I hope they find different ways to put pressure on the player and put their resources to the test.
2023
I've landed on a 7 for this right now but I could see it drifting lower. It gets the surface details right but it doesn't take advantage of it's position to add some much needed layers to JSR's formula, so it feels kind of redundant. The trick system just lacks nuance, so chaining a combo system across an entire map feels trivial after a few hours.
Despite that though the game has a lot of charm, awe inspiring character designs and story moments that got a genuine laugh out of me. The wrapper is great even if the chocolate is just okay. That's how I would describe a lot of sega's legacy library, so maybe this imaginative world and characters will be enough to inspire the next JSR-like, 10 years from now, and the cycle will begin anew.
Or maybe the one sega's making will blow our socks off and put that lingering desire to see the true potential of this IP to bed. A snowball has a better chance in hell, but there's still a chance, right?
Despite that though the game has a lot of charm, awe inspiring character designs and story moments that got a genuine laugh out of me. The wrapper is great even if the chocolate is just okay. That's how I would describe a lot of sega's legacy library, so maybe this imaginative world and characters will be enough to inspire the next JSR-like, 10 years from now, and the cycle will begin anew.
Or maybe the one sega's making will blow our socks off and put that lingering desire to see the true potential of this IP to bed. A snowball has a better chance in hell, but there's still a chance, right?
2023
This review contains spoilers
They get started on the right foot with a comfortable game-feel normally reserved for the most polished of action titles. Moving and dodging feels good, hits feel weighty and the enemy design is consistently solid for a group this large. You have an understanding of action fundamentals here that you just don't get in a lot of ARPGs. For that, the game deserves to be commended. It's only when digging deeper when problems start to arise, which would be excusable for a game half the length of this one.
The gameplay loop is defined by two major stats: Damage and Will Damage. Damage affects the enemy health bar and Will affects the returning stagger bar. This makes the optimal setup obvious from the very beginning: cast abilities with high will onto enemies first with the stagger bar, and then finish them off with high damage abilities when the stagger bar is empty. Since you get the high will damage dealing GARUDA early on, you have everything you need to conquer most enemies and bosses in the game by the time the first third is over.
Ironically, more liberal application of RPG mechanics could have helped with this. The game was right to keep some aspects like armor stats to a minimum, but they went too far and cut out things like elemental weaknesses which would have at least made some abilities less redundant compared to others. When fighting Garuda, casting fire and wind have the same effect when some nuance here would have necessitated a shift in strategy from the rest of the game.
The game neglecting RPG elements to focus on action would at least be admirable if the action side wasn't also underdeveloped. Clive gets a single combo at the beginning of the game with the only way to modify it being the magic burst ability, which might be enough nuance for newcomers but if you've played an action game before the timing will be trivial. Base spells don't differ in terms of damage and AOE like in the kingdom hearts series. They behave like the firearms in games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta with none of the variety offered by either. With each Dominant having a different fighting style, New eikons could have been equipped with different base combos and projectiles to go along with their abilities to differentiate them. This was so obvious that I'm guessing the designers cut it mid development for some reason, which leaves the combat system we have feeling repetitive and unfinished. The generous activation window and i-frames of Precision Dodge means defensive gameplay isn't all that engaging either.
This is where the problems realy begin to start: For a game structured around replayability and nuance it doesn't have any of that to speak of. Just about the only thing you do in between lengthy cutscenes is combat, and with the system struggling to remain interesting in a runtime half as long as a lot of contemporary RPGs it just gets dull long before it's over.
How is that story, anyway? Well, the game fulfills promise of a more grounded setting and tone punctuated by battles between gods of unfathomable power for the first chunk, but as you press on, contrivances begin to pile on and the tone gets more fantastic. A genuinely good arc for Clive carries the game through most of it's rougher moments, but most other characters disappoint. Jill is a noncharacter who might as well be another Torgal for how much she adds to most of the story. Joshua as an enigma creating a trail of questions where every answer turns out to be the least interesting one. Cid is the clear winner of the pack, with a genuinely interesting dynamic with Clive that the game struggles to fill once it decides to kill him off early. The rest of the cast make up the many shops and services in the hideaway. It's going to depend on how much the player wants to invest in boring, repetitive sidequests if they want to make the most of the cast, but the fact that they largely don't take part in the main narrative hurts later proclamations by Clive that his friends form the backbone of his ironclad drive. It's pretty standard RPG fare that would be a lot more emotionally affecting if the game was actually an RPG. Those games are actually built around groups of characters collaborating alongside one another. For a single player action game with one of the dryest casts in recent memory, it's a cliche that falls flat.
The world of Valistea is genuinely interesting, but it's let down by the dull character writing and hackneyed conclusion. The risky decision to base the game's plot around a slave driven economy is an interesting one, but it falls apart under scrutiny. How has the balance of power shifted away from powerful magic users in so many parts of the world?
Even if it didn't, it's a thread the game drops anyway in pursuit of a much more standard plight of a god who grows tired of human conflict and seeks to end it through extreme measures. It's impossible to draw a through-line from the complex issue of slavery to zombies, but bless this game's heart for trying anyway.
It's a game too shallow for all of it's bloat, too juvenile for the tone it wears like a skin and with too dull of an imagination to deliver on all the interesting ideas it puts forward. It's not a bad game, but definitely the most disappointing one I played this year.
The gameplay loop is defined by two major stats: Damage and Will Damage. Damage affects the enemy health bar and Will affects the returning stagger bar. This makes the optimal setup obvious from the very beginning: cast abilities with high will onto enemies first with the stagger bar, and then finish them off with high damage abilities when the stagger bar is empty. Since you get the high will damage dealing GARUDA early on, you have everything you need to conquer most enemies and bosses in the game by the time the first third is over.
Ironically, more liberal application of RPG mechanics could have helped with this. The game was right to keep some aspects like armor stats to a minimum, but they went too far and cut out things like elemental weaknesses which would have at least made some abilities less redundant compared to others. When fighting Garuda, casting fire and wind have the same effect when some nuance here would have necessitated a shift in strategy from the rest of the game.
The game neglecting RPG elements to focus on action would at least be admirable if the action side wasn't also underdeveloped. Clive gets a single combo at the beginning of the game with the only way to modify it being the magic burst ability, which might be enough nuance for newcomers but if you've played an action game before the timing will be trivial. Base spells don't differ in terms of damage and AOE like in the kingdom hearts series. They behave like the firearms in games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta with none of the variety offered by either. With each Dominant having a different fighting style, New eikons could have been equipped with different base combos and projectiles to go along with their abilities to differentiate them. This was so obvious that I'm guessing the designers cut it mid development for some reason, which leaves the combat system we have feeling repetitive and unfinished. The generous activation window and i-frames of Precision Dodge means defensive gameplay isn't all that engaging either.
This is where the problems realy begin to start: For a game structured around replayability and nuance it doesn't have any of that to speak of. Just about the only thing you do in between lengthy cutscenes is combat, and with the system struggling to remain interesting in a runtime half as long as a lot of contemporary RPGs it just gets dull long before it's over.
How is that story, anyway? Well, the game fulfills promise of a more grounded setting and tone punctuated by battles between gods of unfathomable power for the first chunk, but as you press on, contrivances begin to pile on and the tone gets more fantastic. A genuinely good arc for Clive carries the game through most of it's rougher moments, but most other characters disappoint. Jill is a noncharacter who might as well be another Torgal for how much she adds to most of the story. Joshua as an enigma creating a trail of questions where every answer turns out to be the least interesting one. Cid is the clear winner of the pack, with a genuinely interesting dynamic with Clive that the game struggles to fill once it decides to kill him off early. The rest of the cast make up the many shops and services in the hideaway. It's going to depend on how much the player wants to invest in boring, repetitive sidequests if they want to make the most of the cast, but the fact that they largely don't take part in the main narrative hurts later proclamations by Clive that his friends form the backbone of his ironclad drive. It's pretty standard RPG fare that would be a lot more emotionally affecting if the game was actually an RPG. Those games are actually built around groups of characters collaborating alongside one another. For a single player action game with one of the dryest casts in recent memory, it's a cliche that falls flat.
The world of Valistea is genuinely interesting, but it's let down by the dull character writing and hackneyed conclusion. The risky decision to base the game's plot around a slave driven economy is an interesting one, but it falls apart under scrutiny. How has the balance of power shifted away from powerful magic users in so many parts of the world?
Even if it didn't, it's a thread the game drops anyway in pursuit of a much more standard plight of a god who grows tired of human conflict and seeks to end it through extreme measures. It's impossible to draw a through-line from the complex issue of slavery to zombies, but bless this game's heart for trying anyway.
It's a game too shallow for all of it's bloat, too juvenile for the tone it wears like a skin and with too dull of an imagination to deliver on all the interesting ideas it puts forward. It's not a bad game, but definitely the most disappointing one I played this year.
2023
Another strong entry in the series, definitely the best AAA game that's come out in a long time, but is unfortunately living in the shadow of one of the greatest action games ever made and couldn't live up to that.
I'm willing to forgive certain things like some underwhelming setpieces but the mistakes they made with the base controls are hard to swallow. Leon feels designed for a much slower game than this. It's easy enough to adjust and start thinking a few steps ahead on standard but the higher difficulties are more annoying than they ought to be because of it. The sluggish aiming can be patched up a bit too with some tweaks to the game's settings but fire up the original game or even RE2R and what you get is way more responsive there. It just feels like an unnecessary step backwards.
This pairs with another change I don't like. Enemies feel a bit more random this time around. I get what they were going for with this since the original RE4 is a mix of mostly reliable mechanics with some randomness thrown in to keep you on your toes. I don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes to cause enemies to stagger, fall over when hit in the limbs, flinch etc but it feels like the changes combined make the game a bit more random which makes it harder to form and execute a plan. This kind of thing cuts into replayability since this game doesn't feel like something I can master the same way.
Those are my two big complaints, but like I said overall it's a good time. It's not as great at the original RE4 at doing what RE4 does, but it does keep that spirit of constantly springing new circumstances on you to fight around. This is a far cry from the average AAA third person action game where you just fight the same 5 enemies the whole time. It feels like there's something new to worry about every few encounters and keeping that energy up for an entire game is a great achievement, especially with how much more difficult these projects have gotten since the original came out.
I'm lukewarm on the story. "Grounding" Resident Evil 4 always seemed like a bit of a poor fit to me since it's not all that strong of a plot on it's own. It's the exaggerated personalities that make it entertaining so sanding that off and trying to make it more realistic just leaves it with kind of a barebones plot. Characters like Salazar are just being wasted if they aren't getting in your face and taking the piss all the time. With Leon it feels like they couldn't decide if he was going to be a brooding traumatized soldier or the cool collected action hero he was in the OG. They land on this awkward middle ground where he's a bit dull most of the time and the times where he does quip feel a bit out of place. The less I talk about Ada the better. This game is a great reminder of how important voice actors are because it's basically impossible to pull anything deeper out of a reading this dry and matter-of-factual. Every time she was on screen I was just waiting for her to leave again.
It's not all bad though. I liked Luis and Ashley more this time around. Luis is a lot more coherent of a character and his back-and-forth with Leon brings out some of the latter's best moments. I was actually pretty sad when he went down this time. Ashley in particular is pretty lovable and easy to root for compared to the original game, and the connection she makes with Leon feels pretty genuine and enhances the final act by a lot. I can only really remember two moments that felt genuinely tense in the original but in the remake most of the attempts to make the game of a horror piece work out pretty well.
For all it's problems though, I fired up a second playthrough right after I finished it so it's pretty clear we have a pretty good game on our hands here. RE has been such a consistently fun time since 7 came out that I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Remaking your best game seems like a prime recipe for that type of disaster but I'm happy to report that that's not the case. It's a great time. Maybe not the revolution the original was but imo most of RE4's actual strong points went ignored despite it's influence, so it's nice to see Capcom bring some of that greatness back to the surface with the new title.
I'm willing to forgive certain things like some underwhelming setpieces but the mistakes they made with the base controls are hard to swallow. Leon feels designed for a much slower game than this. It's easy enough to adjust and start thinking a few steps ahead on standard but the higher difficulties are more annoying than they ought to be because of it. The sluggish aiming can be patched up a bit too with some tweaks to the game's settings but fire up the original game or even RE2R and what you get is way more responsive there. It just feels like an unnecessary step backwards.
This pairs with another change I don't like. Enemies feel a bit more random this time around. I get what they were going for with this since the original RE4 is a mix of mostly reliable mechanics with some randomness thrown in to keep you on your toes. I don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes to cause enemies to stagger, fall over when hit in the limbs, flinch etc but it feels like the changes combined make the game a bit more random which makes it harder to form and execute a plan. This kind of thing cuts into replayability since this game doesn't feel like something I can master the same way.
Those are my two big complaints, but like I said overall it's a good time. It's not as great at the original RE4 at doing what RE4 does, but it does keep that spirit of constantly springing new circumstances on you to fight around. This is a far cry from the average AAA third person action game where you just fight the same 5 enemies the whole time. It feels like there's something new to worry about every few encounters and keeping that energy up for an entire game is a great achievement, especially with how much more difficult these projects have gotten since the original came out.
I'm lukewarm on the story. "Grounding" Resident Evil 4 always seemed like a bit of a poor fit to me since it's not all that strong of a plot on it's own. It's the exaggerated personalities that make it entertaining so sanding that off and trying to make it more realistic just leaves it with kind of a barebones plot. Characters like Salazar are just being wasted if they aren't getting in your face and taking the piss all the time. With Leon it feels like they couldn't decide if he was going to be a brooding traumatized soldier or the cool collected action hero he was in the OG. They land on this awkward middle ground where he's a bit dull most of the time and the times where he does quip feel a bit out of place. The less I talk about Ada the better. This game is a great reminder of how important voice actors are because it's basically impossible to pull anything deeper out of a reading this dry and matter-of-factual. Every time she was on screen I was just waiting for her to leave again.
It's not all bad though. I liked Luis and Ashley more this time around. Luis is a lot more coherent of a character and his back-and-forth with Leon brings out some of the latter's best moments. I was actually pretty sad when he went down this time. Ashley in particular is pretty lovable and easy to root for compared to the original game, and the connection she makes with Leon feels pretty genuine and enhances the final act by a lot. I can only really remember two moments that felt genuinely tense in the original but in the remake most of the attempts to make the game of a horror piece work out pretty well.
For all it's problems though, I fired up a second playthrough right after I finished it so it's pretty clear we have a pretty good game on our hands here. RE has been such a consistently fun time since 7 came out that I feel like I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Remaking your best game seems like a prime recipe for that type of disaster but I'm happy to report that that's not the case. It's a great time. Maybe not the revolution the original was but imo most of RE4's actual strong points went ignored despite it's influence, so it's nice to see Capcom bring some of that greatness back to the surface with the new title.
2022
I'm almost impressed. Every old development habit they've had is back in full force. Dropping Sonic into a lazy premise that just riffs on whatever's hot at the time instead of building out from his characters and world. Platforming getting interrupted by dull, repetitive beat em up/RPG combat that just drags the pacing of the game down to a slog. Poorly paced, poorly written, unfinished storyline where characters with larger than life personalites and designs that YEARN for interesting motion stand perfectly still, sedated, and talk about their feelings regarding past games instead of doing anything to move the story forward so the team won't have to do too many of those pesky new designs.
What platforming is here is more rigid and automated than ever thanks to a focus on grind rails that fire Sonic along a fixed track, toward a simplistic set of obstacles. It's the Sonic Colors formula again, large focus on simplistic obstacles that can only be focused one way and functional, but dull digital movement that carries no momentum, completely missing the standout appeal of the original games.
The cyberspace stages fare a bit better than the main map, but that's mostly because they're made from the skeletons of levels from better games. The final set on island 4 is all original and honestly the first signs of life this game shows in that entire last half, but the shitty controls mean you can't enjoy it as much as you should. I'm not sure how they've managed to make them worse than they've ever been, and yes, I know about the movement tech. Almost all of these games have it. It doesn't excuse how bad it is on the base level.
I get why this game got higher marks than the others, because one thing Sonic Team is good at is making surface level changes to make it look like they listened. Combat and platforming take place as far apart from eachother as possible with almost no attempt to marry the two concepts in an interesting way aside from a few enemies toward the beginning, but they take place in the same map with no character swapping so you can't REALLY call it an intrusive alternate gameplay style. The tone is darker and the story is addicted to referencing past events, so you can say things have improved and Sega cares more about it's characters and writing now even though the cripplingly dull cutscene direction and shitty narrative design from the last game are still present. You literally cannot parse anything about the ancients from their miles and miles of ruined structures. The fact that they're called "the ancients" instead of giving them an actual name really sums it up. They're a generic ancient society that are a stand in for the ruins and lost civilizations that define other open world action games without any of the effort put into flesh out those cultures. Hell, Sonic Adventure took a much better crack at this in fucking 1999, and that game was in dev for one year instead of 5.
All of this is pretty terrible, but it's nothing new. The biggest shift this game makes is it's structure, dropping Sonic in an open field and giving him a variety of objectives to complete ala a collectathon. Every single interact-able object being a glowing steel gadget directly above the world means that your eyes will be on those instead of parsing the actual environment for details like a normal fucking video game, sucking out the sense of wonder from exploring and leaving you with the busywork.
Some freedom to progress is great, but I think the funniest thing about all of this is how much Sonic Team and the fans hammer home how much you can skip all of it, as if the critique would just become invalid if the game made as much of it's shitty ideas optional. At first I felt a bit cynical about that point, but one of the most highly praised features of this game being the fishing minigame really validated it for me. It's just a braindead QTE that gives you the Power Moons needed to break through certain collectable thresholds enough to move the story along. And people actually PRAISE this feature for making some of the criticism invalid and pushing aside that pesky gameplay so we can focus on the true essence of Sonic: The story.
It's just a mess, and coming off of Lost World, Boom and Forces it's clear I'm the fool for playing along at this point. Sonic's entered a brand new dark age where the goal this time seems to be making the safest bets possible without trying to ruffle any feathers. Take the Colors fundamentals and change the wrapper. Since Sonic team is still pretty shit at designing games this never comes together as the crowdpleaser they clearly WANT so badly,(and before you guys say anything, no, floating around Forspoken's space on metacritic does not mean you made a banger) but it never hits them that they have to actually rethink how they design things if that's what they want. Sonic Colors was a soild game, but it's not rich or flexible enough to keep being used as a baseline.
What platforming is here is more rigid and automated than ever thanks to a focus on grind rails that fire Sonic along a fixed track, toward a simplistic set of obstacles. It's the Sonic Colors formula again, large focus on simplistic obstacles that can only be focused one way and functional, but dull digital movement that carries no momentum, completely missing the standout appeal of the original games.
The cyberspace stages fare a bit better than the main map, but that's mostly because they're made from the skeletons of levels from better games. The final set on island 4 is all original and honestly the first signs of life this game shows in that entire last half, but the shitty controls mean you can't enjoy it as much as you should. I'm not sure how they've managed to make them worse than they've ever been, and yes, I know about the movement tech. Almost all of these games have it. It doesn't excuse how bad it is on the base level.
I get why this game got higher marks than the others, because one thing Sonic Team is good at is making surface level changes to make it look like they listened. Combat and platforming take place as far apart from eachother as possible with almost no attempt to marry the two concepts in an interesting way aside from a few enemies toward the beginning, but they take place in the same map with no character swapping so you can't REALLY call it an intrusive alternate gameplay style. The tone is darker and the story is addicted to referencing past events, so you can say things have improved and Sega cares more about it's characters and writing now even though the cripplingly dull cutscene direction and shitty narrative design from the last game are still present. You literally cannot parse anything about the ancients from their miles and miles of ruined structures. The fact that they're called "the ancients" instead of giving them an actual name really sums it up. They're a generic ancient society that are a stand in for the ruins and lost civilizations that define other open world action games without any of the effort put into flesh out those cultures. Hell, Sonic Adventure took a much better crack at this in fucking 1999, and that game was in dev for one year instead of 5.
All of this is pretty terrible, but it's nothing new. The biggest shift this game makes is it's structure, dropping Sonic in an open field and giving him a variety of objectives to complete ala a collectathon. Every single interact-able object being a glowing steel gadget directly above the world means that your eyes will be on those instead of parsing the actual environment for details like a normal fucking video game, sucking out the sense of wonder from exploring and leaving you with the busywork.
Some freedom to progress is great, but I think the funniest thing about all of this is how much Sonic Team and the fans hammer home how much you can skip all of it, as if the critique would just become invalid if the game made as much of it's shitty ideas optional. At first I felt a bit cynical about that point, but one of the most highly praised features of this game being the fishing minigame really validated it for me. It's just a braindead QTE that gives you the Power Moons needed to break through certain collectable thresholds enough to move the story along. And people actually PRAISE this feature for making some of the criticism invalid and pushing aside that pesky gameplay so we can focus on the true essence of Sonic: The story.
It's just a mess, and coming off of Lost World, Boom and Forces it's clear I'm the fool for playing along at this point. Sonic's entered a brand new dark age where the goal this time seems to be making the safest bets possible without trying to ruffle any feathers. Take the Colors fundamentals and change the wrapper. Since Sonic team is still pretty shit at designing games this never comes together as the crowdpleaser they clearly WANT so badly,(and before you guys say anything, no, floating around Forspoken's space on metacritic does not mean you made a banger) but it never hits them that they have to actually rethink how they design things if that's what they want. Sonic Colors was a soild game, but it's not rich or flexible enough to keep being used as a baseline.
2022
Cleans up a lot of the presentation problems with Nick Brawl but takes a fucking nosedive in every other regard. Genuinely feels like shit to move around and fight in. MOBA-esque 2v2 is the focus here so unlike the flexiblity of smash a lot of characters and abilities don't work outside of that specific context, which squanders otherwise creative kit design and cuts into the madcap pick whatever you want energy, all for a game where people hate being team players anyway and act as individuals.
underneath the "mashing toys together" fantasy that's the whole point of these things. It's supposed to be a fun action game starring your favorite characters, not a decent game that's a means to an end for you to be able to say Super Saiyan Shaggy fought Pennywise.
underneath the "mashing toys together" fantasy that's the whole point of these things. It's supposed to be a fun action game starring your favorite characters, not a decent game that's a means to an end for you to be able to say Super Saiyan Shaggy fought Pennywise.
I've been exhausted with modern gaming focusing on presentation over mechanics but this was a good wakeup call re: how much that stuff really matter. The game feels great to play but no amount of snappy movement tech and mind expanding gameplay depth can cover for Aang's slapshod model and completely busted animations. There's no chance of even remotely buying into the fantasy that you're actually playing as the Avatar here, and thus a lot of appeal goes with that.
The actual cartoonier characters fare a bit better, and the developers seem to get incrementally better and making the most of their low resources with the DLC characters, but none of this feels like enough. Nick has fun interactions and satisfying movement but I ultimately end up going back to Smash Bros every time because that really IS Sora smacking Kirby so hard he gets sent to another timeline. Not a mannequin dressed like him crashing into a guy in a Ninja Turtles suit over and over again until one spontaneously combust. That second fantasy is appealing in it's own way but in a "funny gif on tenor" kind of way, not a "devote hundreds of hours of your life to it" kind of way.
The actual cartoonier characters fare a bit better, and the developers seem to get incrementally better and making the most of their low resources with the DLC characters, but none of this feels like enough. Nick has fun interactions and satisfying movement but I ultimately end up going back to Smash Bros every time because that really IS Sora smacking Kirby so hard he gets sent to another timeline. Not a mannequin dressed like him crashing into a guy in a Ninja Turtles suit over and over again until one spontaneously combust. That second fantasy is appealing in it's own way but in a "funny gif on tenor" kind of way, not a "devote hundreds of hours of your life to it" kind of way.